Posts Tagged ‘Royal Brompton Campus’

Imperial researchers will begin the largest clinical trial of its type to test a new gene therapy treatment for people with cystic fibrosis (CF) thanks to a new grant from a government funding body.

One hundred and thirty adults and children with CF will take part in the trial starting this spring coordinated by the UK Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium (GTC). The GTC is a group of scientists and clinical teams from Imperial, the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and NHS Lothian, who have worked together for the last decade to develop gene therapy for CF.

CF is the most common lethal inherited disease in the UK, affecting around 9,500 people nationally and over 90,000 worldwide. Patients’ lungs become filled with thick sticky mucus and they are vulnerable to recurrent chest infections, which eventually destroy the lungs. The cause of CF, mutations in a gene located on chromosome 7, was identified in 1989, opening the door to replacing this faulty gene using gene therapy.

Patients will receive the treatment by inhaling molecules of DNA wrapped in fat globules that deliver the replacement gene into the cells in the lung lining. Half the participants will receive the real treatment and half a placebo in a doubleblind study.

Professor Eric Alton (NHLI), the GTC Coordinator, said: “This trial will assess if giving gene therapy repeatedly for a year will lead to the patients’ lungs getting better. Eventually we hope gene therapy will push CF patients towards a normal life expectancy and improve their quality of life significantly.”

Did you know that the Guy Scadding Building on the Royal Brompton Campus occupies the site of the former St Wilfrid’s Convent? The convent included a Victorian building built round an inner courtyard, an orangery, a walled garden of trees, shrubs and vegetables, and a shrine. The ash tree alongside the main gate to the building dates back to the convent's days. The nuns nursed and cared for the needy in small cell-like rooms that many years later were occupied by senior academics as offices. The Royal Brompton Hospital bought the convent from the order and, initially, it was used for NHS offices and storage. The College then bought the site from the NHS and found that, instead of a single title deed, each part of the site, for example, the shrine, the vegetable garden, etc., had its own title deed. The nuns had not worried about this sort of detail.